Week 9 Self-Similarity Matrices

The two self-similarity matrices of “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars (chroma and timbre). I chose this song as it is a blend of multiple other genres other than R&B, such as funk, soul, jazz, and pop. Looking at chroma, there are around 7-8 sections. It is interesting to see the yellow sections (strips), this is an indication of the pre-chorus, which has a lower pitch than the chorus as it is mainly comprised of only vocals and drums. The change in instrumentation during the bridge (around min 2:50 or 170 seconds) can be seen in the timbre, making a big yellow cross.

Week 9 - Cepstrogram

Once again, using the song “Uptown Funk”, I created a cepstrogram just to see what kinds of patterns or information it may show. In the first 20 seconds, there is a slightly higher magnitude for c04. Highly likely that it is due to the high-pitched guitar in the background of the introduction. From around 50 seconds, there is only the siren, drums, and vocals used for building up to the beat drop, which is why you can see minimal magnitude. The beat drops (rich instrumental begins) around 67 seconds, which is also represented in c02 as it brightens up in yellow. I also see a correlation between the trumpets used in the song and the highest magnitude/brightest yellow in the cepstogram. This makes sense as c02 usually represents brightness. Around 170 seconds, you can see a drop in c01 and c02, this is the start of the bridge where there is nothing but vocals and drums, and then eventually the bass and other instruments join for the last chorus.

Introduction

Welcome to Maggie’s Computational Musicology Dashboard.

Firstly, I would like to introduce the corpus that I have compiled. My corpus consists of three playlists that are under the Rhythm and Blues (R&B) genre. I decided to pick R&B because it was one of my top most listened-to genres according to the end-of-the-year Spotify Wrapped. Additionally, I would like to learn more about the characteristics of the genre and its long, rich history. R&B is an interesting genre as it is common to see mixes with other popular genres like hip-hop, soul, jazz, and more. The playlists in my corpus differ in decades, the first playlist consists of the top 100 “most essential” R&B songs of the 1990s. The second and third playlists are for the decade 2000s and 2010s respectively. The 1990s playlist consists of 75 songs, the 2000s playlist consists of 100 songs and the 2010s playlist consists of 100 songs. The playlists were directly found and created by Spotify.

Week 8 Homework

This chromagram is made for a specific song in the 1990s playlist called “The Boy Is Mine” by Brandy and Monica. It is a very typical, well-known, and popular song in the R&B genre. In the chromagram, it is clear that the prominent and “loudest” note is C# shown by the magnitude (also how yellow the row is). Following that, G# and F# are also very prominent. Also worth mentioning that A, B, E, and D# are also relatively high in magnitude. It all makes sense because all of these notes belong in the C# minor scale, which is also the key to this song.

I think it is super interesting to see that the first 24/25 seconds are quite empty compared to the rest of the song because only the main melody can be heard clearly and there are almost no other instruments other than some chimes. After the 25th second, the drums, background instruments, vocals, etc come in.

Week 7 Homework Plot 1

Here, I am looking at the change in duration of songs throughout each decade. Due to many reasons, one of them being the introduction of music streaming, songs are becoming shorter in terms of duration. Therefore, I decided to plot/visualize it based on the duration of the songs. Having recently become acquainted with R, I tried making the plots look presentable and clear. I felt that a line graph would be the most appropriate to use to visualize duration and change across time. Additionally, I decided to convert the duration from ms to seconds for clearer representation and assessment.

Looking at the first line plot and comparing the shortest duration for each decade, it is not surprising to see that the 2010s playlists include songs with the shortest duration of less than 100 seconds, which is less than one minute and a half. Moreover, the 1990s playlist included the song with the longest duration out of the entire corpus, being over 400 seconds long (almost 500 seconds, around 8 minutes).

In the second line plot, a connected line graph was used to visually depict the progression of song durations across different time periods. The trend line shows a clear downward trajectory and gradual decline as time goes by, which implies that the duration of songs is getting shorter over the years